By Jof Owen
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"DLTBGYD," wrote Margo Price cryptically on her socials on Tuesday 20 May with a winking face emoji next to it, alongside a video of the singer in the studio with a previously unheard song playing in the background.
The video ends with her turning to the camera and whispering, "Don't let the bastards get you down," which is presumably what the acronym "DLTBGYD" stands for.
It's not clear exactly what's coming but the hashtag #newmusic alongside the post has got fans of the Midwest Farmer's Daughter very excited indeed. Including us!
A day later and the clues continued to drop. This time Margo Price took to the Skinny Dennis photo booth in Nashville for a series of photos that revealed a new tattoo with the phrase "Nolite Te Bastardes Carborundorum" in black lettering.
Although a made-up phrase in mock Latin, "Nolite Te Bastardes Carborundorum" is one of the most iconic slogans in modern literature, popularized by Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale. The novel's protagonist Offred find the phrase scratched into the floor of a cupboard in her room, presumably left as secret message by a previous Handmaid.
As it’s explained in both the novel and the series, the phrase is not actual Latin, but rather a playful distortion of the language that came from a schoolboy's joke, but if it were a real phrase, it would roughly translate to “don’t let the bastards grind you down.”
“Nolite” means “don’t” (plural) in Latin, while “te” means “you.” “Bastardes" is a made-up word with a Latin suffix, and “carborundorum” is not Latin either.
It is often seen as a feminist rallying cry for defiance and resilience against oppression, and even within the book, it inspires Offred to fight back against the forces repressing her. A quick google search brings up a number of tattoos that utilise the phrase.
Margaret Atwood herself has explained that the motto was a joke when she was in school, too.
“I’ll tell you the weird thing about it,” Atwood told Time Magazine in a recent interview. “It was a joke in our Latin classes. So this thing from my childhood is permanently on people’s bodies.”
The phrase "Don't let the bastards get you down" also ties in with one of Margo Price's country music heroes, Kris Kristofferson, as quickly noticed by a number of fans in the comments section below her recent posts.
"Don't let the bastards get you down" became something of a catchphrase for the outlaw country folk singer over his life. He famously evoked it after he introduced Sinéad O'Connor at a Bob Dylan tribute concert in Madison Square Garden in 1992. At the time, O'Connor was under fire for tearing up a photo of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live and when she took to the stage, a chorus of boos erupted in the audience. She stood motionless until Kristofferson returned to encourage her. Apparently, the concert organisers had told him to go out there and pull her off stage but instead, he stood beside her, he put his arm around her and whispered in her ear, “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”
Instead of performing Dylan's 'I Believe in You' as planned, O'Connor removed her in ear monitors and sang-recited an unplanned acapella version of Bob Marley's 'War' before tearfully returning to Kristofferson at the side of the stage.
Kristofferson stuck by her Sinead O'Connor and even wrote a song about her, 'Sister Sinead,' which appeared on his 2009 album Closer To The Bone.
The phrase "Don't let the bastards get you down" was already the title to a Kris Kristofferson song, released in March 1990, before the US invaded Iraq. As Kris Kristofferson's commentary on American military operations overseas, it is a particularly timely reference for Margo Price to make with lines that resound as strongly today as they did 35 years ago.
"They're killing babies in the name of Freedom
We've been down that sorry road before
They let us hang around a little longer than they should have
And it's too late to fool us anymore
We've seen the ones who killed the ones with vision
Cold-blooded murder right before your eyes
Today they hold the power and the money and the guns
It's getting hard to listen to their lies"
George H. W. Bush was the US president at this time, and for the most part, Americans supported his military incursions, including Panama. This put Kristofferson at odds with the majority of country music listeners at the time. A similar situation to the one Margo Price has often found herself in throughout her career, and she often performed with Kristofferson.
First at Willie Nelson’s 4th of July Picnic in 2016, stepping in to sing 'Me and Bobby McGee' when Patti Smith got delayed en route and then again at Glastonbury Festival.
"His voice full of gravel and his words echoed with the gravity of time and wisdom," she wrote about their friendship and her admiration for Kristofferson on her Rawdoggin' Reality SubStack when he died last year. "If you listen hard, you’ll hear his ethos and humanity all woven through the fabric of his songs. Kris didn’t play by anyone else’s rules. He was the embodiment of storytelling in Country Music, but he was also a folkie."
It was in that same SubStack back in April 2024 that Margo Price first began hinting at a return to country music, and if the previously unheard music on her recent socials post is anything to go by, with its chicken picked twangy telecaster country funk riff, she definitely seems to have been recording a country song.
Teasing an impending switch back to a more country sound in a post, titled 'Why I Left Country Music, and Why I'm Coming Back To Kick Its Ass' last April she wrote "I know I'm gonna make this next record the way I want to make it, no matter what it takes."
"Country Music to me is like a toxic ex-boyfriend, I love it so much but I needed some space,” she added as she shared some lyrics and a demo to a new song called ‘Long Story Long.’
"When I walked out of that door several years back, I kept it cracked," she wrote, as she reminisced about listening to country music growing up, making her first album and her experiences in Nashville as a woman. "I never said I was leaving Country Music permanently, in fact, I made sure to mention that I would be returning at some point. Still, somewhere during the end of 2018, I could feel the muse carrying me into other territory. Maybe it was that I felt too much like an outsider in the country world, maybe I felt that I had squeezed every ounce of inspiration out of the genre that I could at the time, maybe it was the mushrooms… Regardless of the reasons, I drifted over the musical lines to follow my restless spirit wherever it led me."
"When I first came on the scene, I was a countryfied, hard headed, whiskey drinkin nobody who was pissed off at the establishment," she wrote. "All of that’s still true, except for the whiskey drinkin part."
"If anything, now that I’ve lived for a while inside of the establishment, I’m even more pissed off," she continued. "I’ve let some people go, I’m still fighting with others to let me be myself, but I know, I’m gonna make this next record the way I want to make it, no matter what it takes."
Margo Price most recently collaborated with Billy Strings on the quintessentially country sounding 'Too Stoned To Cry' and with Orville Peck on the hilariously titled 'You're An Asshole, I Can't Stand You (and I Want a Divorce)' for the masked singer's 2024 Stampede album.
Having recently counted down our very own Holler Top 20 Margo Price songs on her Instagram (a very proud moment for us), we're very excited about the thought of adding some new Margo Price country classics to that already incredible list.
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